I read my first Stephen King book this week. Having done so, I wish that I had not. Before now, I had been proud to say that I had never read a page of King's work. A juvenile stance, perhaps, but a righteous one in my eyes nonetheless. Why waste time on such trash where there is so much great work out there that I'll never have the chance to read? Problem is, that stance was hypocritical to the extreme. I've long railed against those who confine all mystery writing to the genre ghetto, refusing to note the artistic merits of Lehane, Connelly, Pelecanos et al. To dismiss King without having read a word would seem no better.

What swayed me? His latest book, The Colorado Kid, was issued by Hard Case Crime, a new small publisher of paperback pulp novels. Behind those recreations of classically lurid covers lurk some titans of the crime genre. The company already has reissued a couple of out-of-print Lawrence Block books, which was enough to win my undying allegiance. With books forthcoming that are both old, such as a title from Dead Calm author Charles Williams, and new, like the forthcoming collaboration by Jason Starr and the fantastic Ken Bruen, Hard Case Crime's logo seemed like a seal of quality. When The Colorado Kid was announced, it seemed like perhaps this was finally the time to wade into King's work. The spate of reviews that raved about King's brilliant commentary on the very nature of crime fiction and mystery sealed the deal.

What did I find? A half-assed short story padded out to novel length with little in the way of plot, annoying cliched characters and a level of writing that, one hopes, indicates that King wrote this while distractedly watching a movie or cooking dinner. True, the book is not a traditional mystery, but it seems as if most critics have bent over backward trying to find ways to make that lack of resolution seem like some important meta-fictional exercise rather than a lazy, tossed-off project from a guy could sell the scribbled directions to a friend's house written on the back of a take-out menu.

Am I missing something? Jenny Davidson, whose blog, Light Reading, I have come to admire, wrote in the Village Voice that it's "a small masterpiece, a powerful metafiction by a natural storyteller exploring the limits of his art." The Christian Science Monitor's reviewer finds that it "eschews trademark gore in favor of enchanting meditations on unsolved crimes and unresolved stories." King, sounding like a certain president (and using a trick from Dave Eggers playbook) has cut off criticism by writing his own review of the book as an afterword. By noting what critics won't like about the work, and saying they miss the point, he seeks to make all dissenters seem wrong. "Mystery is my subject here, and I am aware that many readers will feel cheated, even angry, by my failure to provide a solution to the one posed," he writes. "...if you tell me I fell down on the job and didn't tell all of this story there was to tell, I say you're all wrong." The Complete Review seems to echo this, by saying that King approached the book in this particular way "well enough -- but mystery fans who like elegant resolutions and every last bit tied neatly together might well be disappointed." Yes, wanting a mystery to end with a resolution is my failing. Of course. Though that is far from my only problem with this thin story. (King may be right, by the way, in saying he told "all of this story there was to tell," though I don't mean that as a compliment)

I'm not alone, however. Patrick Anderson, writing in the Washington Post, called the book "agonizing," while John Koch, writing in the Boston Globe, laments: "If only he could have successfully translated his heartfelt notions in the afterword into lively and persuasive fiction."

This will no doubt do wonders for Hard Case Crime, and for that, I thank King. The story ends after about 175 pages, but there are nearly two dozen more that pitch current and future titles in the series. Here's hoping those drawn by King's name will stick around for the better work that will surely follow. As for King, I can now at least say I tried him before dismissing him. Though it may be unfair to judge him based on something that is clearly (surely?) not his best work, I find myself agreeing with Harold Bloom, whose comments after King received the 2003 National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters, are quoted in Adam Parfrey's review of The Colorado Kid in the Los Angeles Times: "What he is," wrote Bloom, "is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis." The Colorado Kid does nothing to disprove it.